(WMR) — WMR’s intelligence sources in Asia suspect that the March attack on the South Korean Navy anti-submarine warfare (ASW) corvette, the Cheonan, was a false flag attack designed to appear as coming from North Korea.

One of the main purposes for increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula was to apply pressure on Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to reverse course on moving the U.S. Marine Corps base off Okinawa. Hatoyama has admitted that the tensions over the sinking of the Cheonan played a large part in his decision to allow the U.S. Marines to remain on Okinawa. Hatoyama’s decision has resulted in a split in the ruling center-left coalition government, a development welcome in Washington, with Mizuho Fukushima, the Social Democratic Party leader threatening to bolt the coalition over the Okinawa reversal.

The Cheonan was sunk near Baengnyeong Island, a westernmost spot that is far from the South Korean coast, but opposite the North Korean coast. The island is heavily militarized and within artillery fire range of North Korean coastal defenses, which lie across a narrow channel.

The Cheonan, an ASW corvette, was decked out with state-of-the-art sonar, plus it was operating in waters with extensive hydrophone sonar arrays and acoustic underwater sensors. There is no South Korean sonar or audio evidence of a torpedo, submarine or mini-sub in the area. Since there is next to no shipping in the channel, the sea was silent at the time of the sinking.

However, Baengnyeong Island hosts a joint US-South Korea military intelligence base and the US Navy SEALS operate out of the base. In addition, four U.S. Navy ships were in the area, part of the joint U.S-South Korean Exercise Foal Eagle, during the sinking of the Cheonan. An investigation of the suspect torpedo’s metallic and chemical fingerprints show it to be of German manufacture. There are suspicions that the US Navy SEALS maintains a sampling of European torpedoes for sake of plausible deniability for false flag attacks. Also, Berlin does not sell torpedoes to North Korea, however, Germany does maintain a close joint submarine and submarine weapons development program with Israel.

The presence of the USNS Salvor, one of the participants in Foal Eagle, so close to Baengnyeong Island during the sinking of the South Korean corvette also raises questions.

The Salvor, a civilian Navy salvage ship, which participated in mine laying activities for the Thai Marines in the Gulf of Thailand in 2006, was present near the time of the blast with a complement of 12 deep sea divers.

Beijing, satisfied with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il’s claim of innocence after a hurried train trip from Pyongyang to Beijing, suspects the U.S. Navy’s role in theCheonan’s sinking, with particular suspicion on the role of the Salvor. The suspicions are as follows:

1. The Salvor engaged in a seabed mine-installation operation, in other words, attaching horizontally fired anti-submarine mines on the sea floor in the channel.

2. The Salvor was doing routine inspection and maintenance on seabed mines, and put them into an electronic active mode (hair trigger release) as part of the inspection program.

3. A SEALS diver attached a magnetic mine to the Cheonan, as part of a covert program aimed at influencing public opinion in South Korea, Japan and China.

The Korean peninsula tensions have conveniently overshadowed all other agenda items on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visits to Beijing and Seoul.

“The continued policy of closure is unacceptable and politically counterproductive,” EU foreign policy chiefCatherine Ashton said in a statement on Friday.

“We would like to reiterate the EU’s call for an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza,” she added.

The Freedom Flotilla, a multinational relief mission heading for the Gaza Strip, consists of nine vessels from Turkey, Ireland, Britain, and Greece that are currently off the coast of Cyprus.

The mission was organized by the Free Gaza Movement.

Ashton made the remarks after Israel threatened to divert the flotilla to its southern port of Ashdod and to detain the activists onboard, AFP reported.

The Freedom Flotilla is carrying about 10,000 tons of supplies to the 1.5 million people of Gaza, who have endured many hardships during the three-year blockade.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday welcomed the agreements reached at the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference to strengthen the global non-proliferation regime and reiterated support for establishing a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, Xinhuareported.

“The United States has long supported such a zone, although our view is that a comprehensive and durable peace in the region and full compliance by all regional states with their arms control and nonproliferation obligations are essential precursors for its establishment,” Obama said in a statement.

The month-long NPT Review Conference concluded on Friday with a final document in which 189 member nations agree on measures toward disarmament and the establishment of a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East.

Like this:

[The following is proof that American brainwashing efforts at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan’s secret prisons is behind three of the militant insurgencies we fight, either by accident or design. The main leaders of the Afghan, Pakistani and Yemeni Taliban were imprisoned at Guantanamo for years.

A file picture taken on January 26, 2010 shows an armed member of the Yemeni anti-terror unit stands next to relatives of suspected al-Qaeda members outside a court in San’a. AFP photo.

A fugitive Saudi Arabian man, who was once detained at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, was named as a senior member of al-Qaeda’s Yemen wing, theKhaleej Times website reported, citing al-Arabiya television, which published a tape by the group on Friday.

The tape also confirmed the deaths of three leaders killed in December and January during Yemeni air raids, the Arab broadcaster said.

Among those killed were Abdullah al-Muhdar, the leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen’s Shabwa province, Mohammed Amir al-Awlaki, and Mohammed Saleh al-Kazimi.

Uthman Ahmed al-Ghamdi, the 31-year-old man named as a leading al-Qaeda operative on Friday, had been added to a list of the 85 most wanted people by Saudi Arabia 15 months ago, al-Arabiya said.

He spent four years in Guantanamo prison after he was captured in Afghanistan and was released in 2006.

Yemen, neighbor to top oil exporter Saudi Arabia, has been a key Western security concern since the Yemen-based al-Qaeda arm claimed responsibility for a failed December attempt to bomb a U.S. bound passenger plane.

Last month, the group tried to assassinate the British ambassador to Yemen, Tim Torlot, when a suicide bomber voluntarily jumped into the path of the convoy taking the ambassador to work in capital San’a.

The envoy was unharmed and only the suicide bomber died, but the bold hit signaled that a recent crackdown by San’a on the global militant group has done little to curb its ambitions to carry out attacks on international targets.

Western countries and Riyadh want Yemen, grappling with a northern insurgency and southern separatism, to quell its domestic conflicts in order to turn its focus on fighting al-Qaeda, which they see as a bigger global threat.

Guantanamo prison was set up by U.S. President George W. Bush in Cuba in 2002 to hold foreigners captured after U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan to root out al-Qaeda and the Taliban in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

MOSCOW, May 29 (Xinhua) — Russia and the United States have agreed to coordinate efforts to help stabilize the situation in Kyrgyzstan, an official of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.

The agreement was reached after a meeting between Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin and U.S. Assistant Deputy Secretary of State George Krol.

The senior diplomats discussed the situation in Kyrgyzstan, including the preparation for the June 27 referendum on the country’s new constitution and parliamentary elections scheduled for October 10, according to Russian media.

The official said Moscow and Washington had similar assessments of the situation in Kyrgyzstan which suffered bloody uprising in early April that killed over 80 people and ousted former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev.

Terrorists (Punjabi Taliban) simultaneously attacked two Ahmedi sect mosques in Lahore during Friday prayers and killed over 80 people. First thoughts on this evil attack:

1. The choice of target is easy to understand. Ahmedis are a persecuted and vilified minority in Pakistan and “mainstream” news organizations feel no compunction about attacking them, so the ground is already prepared. e.g. GEO TV’s religion presenter (and phony doctor) Amir Liaqat Hussain, a former minister, encouraged people to kill them if they “overstepped their bounds” and an Ahmedi doctor was promptly killed; there was some fuss in the liberal press but Jahil online is still on TV and writes a particularly vicious column in a major newspaper.
2. The day is also significant. It is the anniversary of Pakistan’s nuclear explosion and is a national day of jingoism, so the jihadis probably regarded it as appropriate for such an action.
3. There will be talk of stepped up security and other such BS, but the fact is that such terrorism is unstoppable until you get at the infrastructure that trains and guides these terrorists. This infrastructure of support and guidance is known to everyone in Pakistan, but decisive action is difficult because:

A. The army set up and protected this monster and knows better than anyone how big the operation is. Arif Jamal (in the book “shadow wars”) estimates that the army and its subcontractors trained half a million jihadis. That’s a lot of trained killers even for a country as big as Pakistan. Even if some of the top brass now want to proceed against them, they would prefer to do so slowly and in small increments. Slow and steady action also ensures a long-term American GWOT subsidy, so the top brass may not see any need to hurry.

B. Because the army does not like to admit mistakes, it has never really let the general public know that mistakes were made and enemies within were created by the blessed armed forces themselves. Instead, they rely heavily on the narrative of “foreign hand” and “Indian-zionist agents”. This means the “information war” is a total mess and the general public (whose cooperation is essential for any counter-insurgency) remains confused about who is fighting whom and for what purpose. Again, the confusion may suit the general staff just fine (letting them hang on to some shred of their jihadist/islamist bona-fides while collecting American subsidies and gradually taking action against terrorists who refuse to limit themselves to anti-Indian or anti-Afghan actions. ) but is not helpful to anyone else. Public officials, politicians and media personalities not only add to the confusion, they THEMSELVES remain confused, which inhibits decisive action and allows terrorist supporters to operate unchecked.

C. Several decades of officially sponsored jihadist propaganda have created a significant jihadist constituency in the educated classes. What the Marxists of yore would call the “class interests” of this elite force them to be anti-jihadi (because those “class interests” are intertwined with a capitalist global economy and the modern world in general, and the modern world currently has low tolerance for the jihadist project). But their ideological vocabulary (the story they tell themselves about the world) is heavily colored by Islamist and Jihadist elements. The resulting cognitive dissonance not only gives migraines to the American embassy, it also undermines the anti-terrorist effort in significant ways.

D. And ALL THIS is layered on top of the “baseline” level of violence one expects in any mismanaged, unequal, unfair, over-populated, under-represented, mis-educated and ethnically divided third world population. Some level of organized and unorganized violence against the corrupt state shows up in the Hindu kingdom of Nepal, the secular republic of India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, etc. in various forms, ranging from large scale criminality to Maoist insurgencies. In remote places, the weakness of the state also lets the people organize on ethnic and religious basis and local armed gangs are a feature of all these societies. It sounds almost unbelievably stupid, but our brilliant general staff actually played a role in creating ethnic militias in our largest city as well. These alone would be a large enough set of headaches for any country, but the general staff added an islamist insurgency on top of all these “normal” South Asian problems (and of course, the two merge in various creative ways). When it rains, it pours.

But all this does not mean that Pakistan will not survive. I still think it will survive. In fact, I will stick my neck out and predict that:

1. Very slowly, painfully and very very incompetently, the ruling elite will fight the jihadist insurgency and eventually bring it under control (and some in the elite will get very rich doing so).
2. The baseline “Maoist” component of the insurgency could potentially have grown into a serious problem, but Islamism will co-opt all other grievances and will save the ruling elite in the long run because the hardcore Islamists are so insane, the corrupt and vicious ruling elite will look better by comparison.
3. India, China, Iran and America will spend sleepless nights figuring out how to keep Pakistan in one piece and while their efforts will occasionally work at cross purposes, the overall impact will be positive.

4. Islamism as it currently exists is not compatible with coexistence in the modern world. It will be modified and replaced with a more flexible Islamist vocabulary, but it will take some time. Flexible and accomodating versions of Islam that freely borrowed from local traditions and were more aligned with actual human needs in our part of the world were dominant in folk Islam in India. These flexible forms were mostly sufi-derived and transmitted via everyday folk culture, not through “high church” texts. Now that literacy and concrete thinking are more prevalent and folk culture is increasingly disconnected from people who have moved to new cities and live new lives, the folk versions are at a disadvantage and literal-minded modern people are susceptible to the jihadi-oriented orthodox version. Saudi money, CIA ingenuity and narrow-minded versions of Pakistani ideology did their magic and an entire generation grew up hostile to the flexible and humane folk Islam of our ancestors (usually dismissed as “Hindooana rusoom”).

The Islam regarded as orthodox and correct by these new literate Muslims is susceptible to jihadist interpretation. The elite encouraged this interpretation in the mistaken belief that it would help them gain the upper hand against India. Now that whole project has blown up in their face. Many of them realize that a change of course is needed, but they lack the vocabulary and the stories that would flesh out this new course. Infidels, lacking local knowledge and empathy and frequently having other interests in view, probably do more harm than good when they try to identify “sufi” and “moderate” versions to encourage. But in the long run, the needs of the elite will demand a new orthodoxy compatible with modern needs and the demand will be met. Its hard to see right now because these are still early days in this turnaround. But economic and social pressures are pushing in that direction and will prove unstoppable. Until then, the show must go on. And even when this monster is brought under control, the “normal” problems of South Asia will still remain to be solved.

There are a number of Taliban / Sipah-e-Sahaba / Al Qaeda supporters active on the internet in Pakistan and abroad. These people (usually hired by the Hizb ut-Tahrir or Jamaat-e-Islami) have different names and aliases. For example, on Pak Tea House and Pakistaniat, they are active with names such as Mazbut, Adnan Siddiqui, Addu etc. On pkpolitics, they adopt names such as geog, shimatoori and nota etc. As sham writers, they adopt aliases such as Earthman / International Professor, Syed Adeeb, Abidullah Jan, Dr Shahid Qureshi etc.

Here are two gems from Punjabi Taliban apologists, from two Pakistani blogs, commenting on Lahore’s Ahmedi massacre:

geog47 said:
28 May 2010 at 5:17 pm

Correction, these were not Masajid, as Masjid is a place where Muslims worship not Kafirs. These Qadiyanis are Kafirs, hence their structures are defined as places of worship, not Masjid. Plus it should be understood by now that we should be marking these non-Muslims on their ID Cards and Passports. Also, the Pakistanis should know very well that these Qadiyanis do not fit in the catagory of Kafirs, rather a far worse catagory which in Islam is’Wajib-ul-Qatl’ (Permitted to Kill). Kafirs are disbelievers, they know it and they do not accept Muhammad Sallallaho Alaihi Wassallam as the Prophet of Allah Sunhanaho Wata’aalah.

However, these Qadiyanis invoke the anger of Allah Subhanaho Wata’aalah because they impersonate Muslim/Islamic beliefs and call themselves Muslims. Globally, a Muslim is one who submits to the will of Allah Subhanaho Wata’aalah and accepts Muhammad Sallallaho Alaihi Wassallam as the final Prophet of Allah Subhanaho Wata’aalah. This is where they (Qadiyanis) are worse than Kafir and it is permissible in Islam to kill them. It is a duty unto all Pakistani-Muslims to kill and/or kick out Qadiyanis from our lands (Pakistan). Perhaps india, which is where they originate from anyway.

The attack on Ahmadiya temples is condemnable but at the same time cursing others is tantamount to spreading more sectarian hatred.

Praising the Mirzais for what they have or haven’t done for Pakistan doesn’t mean that they are infallible.

The Constitution declares them as non-Muslims and minority yet they root cause which led to the present attack on their temples seems to be ‘impersonation of Islamic signs and symbols”. How can a non-Muslim call its place of worship as a Mosque??

No place is a mosque where any Muslim is not allowed to enter and worship. Sadly enough, sectarian divisions among Muslims have barred one Muslim to worship in another Muslims place of worship marked as Imam bargahs , Jama’at Khana, Mosque, etc etc . The present attack seems to occur due to adamancy of Mirzai’s to call their place of worship as Mosque and the objection by all other Muslim sects to that effect. After having invented a prophet of their own they have breached from the Islamic fundamentals and as such ought to refrain from playing with the sentiments of other Muslims by faking Islamic ‘names and symbols’.

Only this way can they be said to be minding their own business and others minding their own!!

…The Sikhs also believe in One God….does that mean they are Muslims and mimic Muslim Kalima or signs and symbols?? No. They have a distinct identity as a religious people of Sikhism. Likewise if the abusive Mirzai’s declared their true identity as non-Muslims and refrained from the profanity of faking Islamic customs they would create less uproar and unrest in the Islamic world!